It's Time to Put That Away

It’s Time to Put That Away

And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God [but seek to please Him], by whom you were sealed and marked [branded as God’s own] for the day of redemption [the final deliverance from the consequences of sin]. Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor [perpetual animosity, resentment, strife, fault-finding] and slander be put away from you, along with every kind of malice [all spitefulness, verbal abuse, malevolence]. Be kind and helpful to one another, tender-hearted [compassionate, understanding], forgiving one another [readily and freely], just as God in Christ also forgave you.

Ephesians 4:30-32

I’m sure everyone can remember this phrase growing up, “alright now, it’s time to put that away.”  And it would usually come at a time when we weren’t ready to. Paul tells us in the book of Ephesians, that it is now time to put off, put on, and put away, “now that we have put on the new life of Christ, we should no longer be walking as the Gentiles do, if we have truly learned Christ. We should put off the old self, which belongs to the former way of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and we should be renewed in the spirit of our minds, and to put on the new self, which is created after the likeness of God in true righteousness.” Paul also says that anger has a time limit, “be angry, but sin not, don’t let the sun go down on your anger” and if we don’t heed this, it literally gives place to the devil. We cannot have true righteousness, if we are housing anger, because excessive anger does not produce the righteousness of Christ, so I want to share three righteousness killers that anger produces when we don’t put it away in a timely manner and will prevent you from truly producing the righteousness of Christ.

1. The first righteousness killer anger produces when we don’t put it away in a timely manner is Bitterness. How many of you remember when we used to have porcelain sinks? And if there was a slow drip from the

fossette, it would start to turn a lite yellow color, then brownish, then a darker dirty brownish, and finally into a black stain. That is what bitterness looks like in the life of a believer. It’s a slow drip that poisons everything in the believer’s life. Nothing grows in bitter waters, it becomes stagnant, and it stinks. We will start to become wretched, instead of righteous. When my ex-husband decided he didn’t want to be married anymore and at the same time being betrayed by the sisters I thought I was in covenant with, God said if I didn’t let it go, I would become a stench in His nostrils and I would die a spiritual death because holding on to that would lead me to the second righteousness killer.

2. The second righteousness killer is Unforgiveness. God told me to find every scripture that I could find on the heart, which led me to Psalms 4:23 that says, “above everything else guard your heart with all diligence, because out of it flows the issues of life.” He said forgive them; all of them, everyone I believed had hurt me. I had to allow unforgiveness to flow out, so that forgiveness could flow through, and if I didn’t, it would lead me to my final righteousness killer.

3. The final righteousness killer is Broken Fellowship. Do you realize that unforgiveness is a sin? If we are in sin, it breaks our fellowship with God and if we are not in fellowship with Him, then we can’t grow in Him, and we can’t produce true righteousness.

We have the right to be angry, but we do not have the right to stay angry, because it will produce righteousness killers in our lives, bitterness, unforgiveness and broken fellowship, which is not what God desires, so say to yourself aloud: It’s time to put that away!

It’s Time to Put That Away